Marco Ferrazzani (ESA Representative)
Marco Ferrazzani is the Legal Counsel and Head of the Legal Services department at the European Space Agency, based at its headquarters in Paris, France. In this position, he provides a full spectrum of legal advice and guidance on the legal and programmatic aspects of ESA’s programmes and policies.
As ESA’s Legal Counsel, Dr. Ferrazzani is advisor to the ESA Director General and to the ESA Council for all institutional and legal matters, including the interpretation of the ESA Convention and all relevant legal instruments. In addition to managing a team of international legal officers in his role as Head of the Legal Services department at ESA, he advises ESA’s organs and its Member States on a wide variety of legal matters. These include protecting and defending ESA’s rights and position, identifying risks and devising legal solutions to mitigate these, preparing in the drafting of agreements, conducting international negotiations as well as preparing institutional decisions, resolutions, declarations and other legal instruments for the execution of European space programmes.
Dr. Ferrazzani represents ESA at international conferences and is the Head of Delegation to the Legal Sub-Committee of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS). He is regularly invited as a guest lecturer at various university courses on the international law of space activities, an area of law on which he has also authored numerous papers at conferences and articles in law and policy journals. Moreover, he sits on a number of boards including those of the European Centre for Space Law (ECSL) and the International Institute of Space Law (IISL).
Dr. Ferrazzani graduated cum laude from the University of Naples Faculty of Law, where he specialised in and received the university prize for best doctoral thesis in international and comparative law. His postgraduate legal studies included courses at Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School and the University of Salzburg. He was also admitted as an auditeur in the 2006 “Session Nationale” of the French Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defence (IHEDN).
Before joining ESA, he was admitted to legal practice at the Bar in Italy and practiced law in the Milan office of one of the leading international commercial law firms (Baker & McKenzie) where he acted as the legal counsel and representative for corporate clients in the areas of corporate law, international transactions, foreign investment and litigation.
